A session bean may be either:
- Stateless—the session bean instances contain no conversational state between methods; any instance can be used for any client.
- Stateful—the session bean instances contain conversational state which must be retained across methods and transactions.
- Singleton—a single session bean instance is shared between clients and supports concurrent access.
- In the case of a stateful session bean, its fields contain a conversational state on behalf of the session object’s client.
- This state describes the conversation represented by a specific client/session object pair. A stateful session bean’s lifetime is controlled by the client.
